Monthly Archives: July 2014

We try to get up to the lake at least once a year, to let me have a good swim and for Giles, who loves it as much as I do.

His favorite activity is to chase tennis balls thrown into the water. Giles loves chasing balls, but has never figured out the part where you bring the ball back. I guess that esoteric knowledge is more familiar among retrievers. However, the lake is a fun place because it’s the only time Giles will chase a ball and actually bring it back, even if it’s only because he’ll drown if he never returns.

It’s a fact of life that any good lake or pond will attract a lot of people, and so we have to carefully plan these trips to avoid crowds. We go when the weather isn’t all that great, or we get up really early, etc.

This time we got up early and went straight there. The place was nearly empty except for a few kayakers and some guy in a red pickup who was just…sitting in there.

The problem with trying to go to the lake at odd, unpopular times is that while the crowds are greatly reduced, any people who are actually there at those weird times tend to be weirdos. But not all of them. Some lady with an elderly border collie and a bouncy young boxer came along. She’d clearly come to give her dogs a run around, and seemed pleased that her young boxer had somebody to play with.

I wasn’t a fan of going for a swim while a creepy guy sat alone in his red pickup truck, staring at us, but we’d come all this way. Plus, Giles was having a blast. I did my best to ignore him, but that got harder to do fairly soon.

Look again at the “dogs playing” pictures above. Do you see an indistinct, Nessie-like silhouette in nearly every picture? That’s the creepy guy. Eventually he got out of his truck and crawled into a wetsuit. I was curious about the wetsuit- the water had to be over 80 degrees. Who the hell wears a wetsuit in a freshwater lake? In July? In *Georgia*? Ok, we thought- maybe he’s putting on a wetsuit because he’s one of those serious swimmer-guys who’s planning on swimming a mile across the lake or something. Good, because once he set out on his marathon swim, he would be off and stop being creepy.

Except he didn’t swim across the lake. He waded into the area where I’d been swimming before and then just….sat there, crouched in the water for a good ten minutes, not swimming, not floating, just….sitting. And also photobombing all my dog pictures, making it look like we’d found Bigfoot at the lake going for a dip.

He eventually got out and went back to sit in his truck. I went back for a swim, but he came out shortly again to take pictures of the dogs with his phone. And Giles, ever the open-hearted, affectionate one, ran over to him to tell HI YOURE A CREEP I LOVE YOU IM THE DOG. At this point I was unhappy about the prospect of being photographed by a creepy stranger while I was wearing a bathing suit, so I asked Jon if he wanted to leave. The boxer-lady said bye to Giles and moved her dogs along, and the creepy guy packed up his wetsuit and took off while Jon and I were drying off and getting our shoes on.

Ah, well. Putting up with one creepy fella was a small price to pay. I wonder if there’s some blog out there with Giles’s pictures, taken by that guy.